Too much gaming

I lived with a gamer once. He spent most of his time hunched over his computer in his dimly-lit room. At night, he would continue playing, only stopping to use the bathroom and eat a frozen burrito or some cold cereal. Now and again, he would burst out in uncontrollable laughter, sometimes in the middle of the night. He chose to socialize virtually in his MMORPG rather than verbally with his roommates. The rest of us would occasionally invite him to go out and do things but he would politely decline. His hygiene had crumbled into ruin to the point where we could tell he'd walked in the room just by inhaling. To this day I regret that there wasn't a more concerted effort to encourage him to change. How does this happen to a 6'8" 18-year-old football player? Gaming was for him, as it is for many, a serious addiction in every sense of the word. It can start off as a healthy way to blow off some steam or spend time with friends. In rare but gradually more frequent cases, real life becomes a mere side effect of being alive; the game is where one's new life continues. Games are not inherently bad but severely skewed priorities are.

What's in store for family history?

Huge advances were made with family history in the 1980's and 1990's with the advent of personal computers. Although the physical copies of past family history work have their own intrinsic value, their purpose was better carried out by the digital revolution. In the late 2000's, the next innovation was FamilySearch Indexing, which was far more inspiring to those without a desire or time to compile a complete family history. Indexing names taps into the power of crowd-sourcing but, more importantly, it helps relieve a healthy amount of guilt from members of the LDS Church (myself included) who had yet to do any family history. What's next for this field? We've only just scratched the surface.

How to get the word out

How do you get the word out? Social media is really the answer in most cases. Take the Orabrush, for example. This ordinary oral hygiene tool with no real glamour has become a household name. Originally its owner considered sending it to the graveyard of advertising: the infomercial. This uninspiring, overenthusiastic and underwhelming format has doomed many great products. Instead of mercilessly beating his cherished invention, he took it to a group of marketing students at Brigham Young University. They leveraged the power of today's great social media sites, Youtube.com, and advertised it as a no-brainer product for young adults. The clever part is that they made something that people not only want to watch, but that they want to share. The rest is history. Once you tug on the world's heart strings or tickle its funny bone, you'll be able to get the word out.